Roots of Violence in Modern Man

Webster's New International Dictionary16 defines aggression as ‘to go forward or approach.’ This description leaves the door wide open to psychological interpretation for it depends how one goes forward and approaches, whether constructively, creatively, hostilely or destructively. A healthy baby has a natural aggressive drive to act, to hold, to master its mother's breast and to incorporate her milk. The mother can foster these aggressive actions by gently giving her breast and nipple to the baby. A hostile mother will push her nipple into the baby's mouth and thus reject it by just too much action and too much aggression.

Three schools of thought have developed about the concept of hostile and destructive aggression in human beings. Freud was of the opinion that aggression is an instinctual drive and he equated it with the death instinct. He believed that children are instinctively destructive and aggressively hostile against the mother, her inside, her unborn and subsequently born children. This school of thought believes in an innate aggression with related hostility, guilt and anxiety—which fosters the assumption that hostile aggressiveness and anxiety would be the expected normal behavior of children unless they are subjected early and persistently to education based on inhibition, discipline and restraint.

Bender1 holds still a different view of aggression in childhood. She says that the child has an inherent capacity or drive for normality which is determined by biological maturation or patterned growth. If constructive drives in the child find inadequate means of satisfaction,